Women, feminism, and geek culture

The Linkspam of All Maladies (3 April 2015)

Starting out with a handful of links related to Ellen Pao:

The Limits of the Ellen Pao Silver Lining | Inc.: “It’s a sinking feeling reinforced by Claire Cain Miller’s New York Times interviews about the verdict with venture capitalists. When asked what they learned from the whole experience, they told Miller the case had taught them to:be less overtly sexist in work emails; formalize human resources standards; and be less hasty about declining to fund female entrepreneurs so quickly. Big progress, right? I mean, those are all good things, but shouldn’t they pretty much be table stakes at this point?”

Ellen Pao and the Sexism You Can’t Quite Prove — NYMag: “It is a form of soft discrimination that I fear might be all too familiar to all too many women — and often I find it hard to explain to my male friends and colleagues. Occasionally, I even find myself struggling to convince them that it is discrimination, and that it has consequences. It is pervasive. It is persistent. And it is so, so exhausting, all those subtle hints that you are a little different and that your behavior is being interpreted a little differently. On top of that, it does have profound consequences, if made through a million tiny cuts. The idea is to force covert sexism to be made overt where you can, around the conference table if not at the ski lodge or the cocktail party. Only then can you stamp it out.”

Ellen Pao, Kleiner Perkins and foiled champions — Medium: “We have gotten carried away with our own fabulousness to the degree that we don’t even see newcomers or people who choose to labor in the background. It’s a kind of power and influence that is exclusionary — making it less possible, month by month, for people outside power circles to enter the halls of influence, partake of its bounty and contribute to our industry and the world. This isn’t right, kind or productive.”

Call for proposals: !!Con 2015 | composition.al: “This year, for the second year in a row, my friends and I are organizing !!Con (pronounced bang bang con), a conference about the joy, excitement, and surprise of programming. !!Con is a conference with “a mission of radical inclusivity” where all the talks are ten minutes long1 and cover a bewilderingly wide range of topics.”

tim | “Call-out culture is very problematic,” said the naked emperor frantically | tim: “The general principles of skepticism, evidence-based decision-making, and even civility can be useful tools, but don’t obligate us to entertain those who use them in a way that sets off our bullshit detectors. And anti-call-out-culture crusaders are obviously insincere — if they were sincere, wouldn’t they spend some time doing something other than the activity they claim to detest (namely, calling people out)?”

Your Brief And Wondrous Guide To Contemporary Queer Comics | Huffington Post: “The following artists and creatives identify as queer, among other labels, like, for example, comic, illustrator, storyteller and writer. They defy rigid categorization in both life and work, weaving wonderfully unique and sex-positive tales about everything from college parties and intergalactic adventures to a criminal potato. If the following artists show us anything, it’s that there’s no one way to be queer. And why would you want to, when each individual perspective looks oh-so beautiful?”

Galactic Suburbia » Episode 116: 18 March 2015: “It’s our special 2014 Galactic Suburbia Award episode! Listen to find out our winner and shortlist for our award to honour activism and/or communication that advances the feminist conversation in the field of speculative fiction.”

How to defeat Internet bullies – CSMonitor.com: [CW: examples of online harassment and abuse] “Danielle Citron, a leading expert on privacy and online harassment, says it’ll take enforcing existing state laws as well as as broader societal acknowledgement that what happens online has real world effects, too. I recently spoke about these issues with Ms. Citron, the Lois K. Macht Research Professor of Law at the University of Maryland.“

We Need More Badass Women: TV Bosses Tell Us Why The Bechdel Test Isn’t Enough | MTV News: “Some male writers might be absolutely fantastic at writing well-rounded, complex female characters (and vice-versa), but when it comes down to it, the consensus amongst the showrunners we interviewed seems to be that diversifying a writing staff leads to more complex characters. And since most TV writers look more like Rick Grimes than Carol Peletier — more like Michael Scott than Leslie Knope — it’s shows dominated by white men, with female characters existing as extensions of those men, that you’ll continue to see. (Minus, of course, the several standouts we’ve already mentioned.)”

We link to a variety of sources, some of which are personal blogs. If you visit other sites linked herein, we ask that you respect the commenting policy and individual culture of those sites.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on Pinboard, Delicious or Diigo; or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).